I like to stroll in empty lots, full of weeds
thorns and broken glass.
More peaceful this way
than in some imagined future
when the land is sold off
to the highest bidder and filled
with fast food joints and markets selling
cheap goods made by foreign slaves
and cars frantically searching for the closest
parking space, and people scrambling
for the best deals for as much as they can get
not seeming very happy to get it.
Parents, dragging their kids along
like little sponges soaking up the
living waters of the great marketplace.

I consider all this, and rejoin the passing moment.
A man is walking his dog some distance away.
The dog sniffs, squats, and after,
they both walk away, leaving the **** behind.
I walk on through the tall weeds, swooshing,
catching seeds in the hairs on my legs, a sower.
And every shard of broken beer bottle reflects
Sun and sky, like jewels
in Indra’s net.

I hope one day
I can look at life,
and at you,
like a newborn
that hasn’t yet learned
to smile, or frown,
or the unwritten law
of when he must turn
from the gaze
of the other.
Until then,
sometimes
I just have to stare
at my shoes.

House sitting at Mom’s
and couldn’t sleep, so
I was snooping a bit in the
closet of the spare bedroom.
There’s a box there,
pieces of my childhood in it.
A story I wrote when I was
8 or 9, about a haunted house
A ghost lived there, a ghost
with just a pair of eyes that
watched me wherever I went.
I was alone in this house,
and there were many doors,
thousands of them.
Some led to empty rooms, or rooms
full of skeletons of others
who died before they found their way out.
Some other doors led to long hallways
with thousands of other doors,
and some others led to prisons,
or dungeons with implements of torture.
And I wandered and searched, for years...
according to the child “me”,
until finally I found a secret door I hadn’t seen,
and was free.  
I went home, and my parents were worried,
And happy to see me.

....a ghost watching, many doors,
wrong turns down hallways, prisons...
How did the child know?  
Maybe only children
and those close to death
know anything.  
Or they don’t pretend to know something
that we capable adults pretend to know.

We talk about time
as if it were a space
we travel through....
if I could just get across this space
this empty room that seems
so daunting but the wall
on the other side keeps
moving away from me
and even if I reached it, then what?

And sometimes the room is not empty
but filled with light, shadows, reflections,
things my own paintbrush has created,
childhood beasts that cause me to jump
or hide even though I vaguely remember
painting them myself.

If you have ever been my friend
and in that room we are still laughing
and joyful, or you have been
my enemy and I am still wrestling
with you there,
then please tell me
where you end
and I begin.

All worldly powers
are his, and yet
his decisions are made
with a mind like a rabid mouse.
He got what he wanted,
which was everything,
now everything is his
to lose.

His is not the misery
of privation, cured by
a roof for the night,
a plate of food,
a warm bed,
but the misery of too much,
yet not enough
for which no remedy exists.

I must apologize, for
when I see you
I do not see you
but only my own shadow
cast across your face.

And when you speak,
I cannot hear you
but only the winds
howling through my mind
carrying your voice far from me.

As it is with us
so is it with nations,
like hungry dogs barking at
their own long shadows.
The sun of civilization
low on the horizon.
The hatred perfect, complete
as only self-hatred can be.